Telescopes in contact lenses: a brilliant idea after the fiasco of Google Glass

Yesterday at SXSW, the world’s grooviest ‘interactive festival’, the head of Google X – the company’s mysterious research lab – finally admitted it. Google Glass was one gigantic embarrassment. Or, as Astro Teller put it, ‘We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the programme’. You don’t say. For a glimpse of the sort of attention Google didn’t want, just look at the photograph above – some poor sap on the subway using Google Glass and a smartphone. It went viral on Twitter. The guy was dubbed ‘the glasshole’, a pun that works in both American and English accents.

Google Glass has given wearable tech a bad name: it’s raw material for standup comics. You do have to wonder whether something went wrong when Google was downloading its sense of humour, given that Astro Teller’s official title is Captain of Moonshots.